The Big Blue Marble, Part II

So yesterday I wrote about the confluence of radio and sailing, and how that invokes in me feelings of awe and concern.  This post is to elaborate and expand on those feelings.  Today I stayed home from work as both my wife and my son are ill with a cold.  This gave me the opportunity to work more with the radio, and attempt to make more contacts over that device.  To those of you who know nothing about amateur radio, one large aspect of this past time concerns making contacts with distant but like-minded souls across the earth.  These contacts can be separated by ten of thousands of miles away or they can be with the person next door.  These contacts are called QSOs, which is a hangover from Morse code days.  There are tens of thousands of QSOs completed in the course of a day.

There is a feature of the Earth, the ionosphere, that permits these contacts, and the quality of that feature can vary from day to day, and can vary from region to region.  The thing about today was that the ionosphere gods were very displeased with me today, and their displeasure was demonstrated in a now hot, now cold performance.  At one moment my radio signal was heard by another station in Sweden, and at the next moment I could not hear anyone.  But the same ionosphere was effecting hundreds of other hams in far away places, in what I believe was a similarly capricious way.  These hams were scattered all over the world, and they were all effected by the same weird ionosphere, which is a feature of the world that no one knew existed one hundred years ago.  We were all in it together, and that sense of community invokes in me a feeling of awe and of respect.

This is driven home when you view the numerous maps that show the state of something, anything, in the world.  Go to Google maps and you can zoom out to see a view of the Earth with North and South America somewhere in the center, and the other continents, no less important, on the side.  If I were a European, I suppose my Google map would be centered on Europe.  Still, it is all there, the whole Big Blue Marble, and we are all on it together, and we are all doing something on that sphere, and sometimes we are all doing things together, including silly things like bouncing radio signals off of the ionosphere.  That fact, that simple fact, fills me with awe.

And concern.  Even in the midst of the ocean, you can still be connected, and who wouldn't want to be so connected.  Even in the midst of the ocean, there is someone near by, which could be a relief or a source of sadness.  But it is more and more difficult to "get away from it all", and even if you could get away from humanity somehow, you would still be on this world, this Earth, and you would still be effected by the ionosphere and by all the other layers of the atmosphere, and you would still be effected by humanity through the changes that humanity are generating on that atmosphere.  You would still be effected by changes that humanity is generating on the land and on the sea.

My concern is that if we don't get our collective acts together, and soon, those communities with which I am so proud will collapse in a jumble of competing groups.  Let's hope not.

The Big Blue Marble

Those of you who have been regularly following this blog (yuk yuk) will note my longish absence and wonder where I have been.  Well, I could say that I've been busy, but I am tired of using that as an excuse.  As Nassim Taleb wrote elsewhere (and I paraphrase), saying that "I am busy" is a sign of either disinterest in you or a sign of incompetence.  I prefer saying that I have been disinterested in posting to this blog. 

Last time I wrote I was really jazzed about Facebook and all things Internet.  This was after reading "The Social Animal."  Now, a year later, I can say that I am safely over that, and that I have disable my Facebook account (yes, friends, I know and I am sorry) and that I have minimized my use of computers, cell phones, and the like.

Well, you ask, what does this somewhat bizarre person in Tucson do with his time?  It varies, but this week I have been working in the "Man Cave" on my radio.  Recently I have got onto APRS from my home station in the Cave, and have demonstrated the transfer of messages via APRS from my home station to my APRS ready handheld radio. 

I have also been working with Winlink 200 which is a very delightful protocol for the transmission of email to and from HR radio stations.  Very neat indeed.  There is some integration with GPS, or you can just type in your current position and send a position report to the rest of world.  

It is the position reports to Winlink 2000 that prompted me to generate this first post in over a year.  Just look at all of the yachts that are sailing in the midst of the oceans.  Many are in the Pacific and Indian oceans, few are in the Atlantic.  Many just appear to be exploring exotic coast lines -- Palau, Greenland, Fanning Island to name just a few.  I am in awe of these audacious sailors, and wish that my own circumstances would let me join them.

But looking at these reports shows me just how small the world is.  The entire Google map fits on this smallish laptop screen, and each of those blue pinpoints in the oceans represents a small vessel in transit, and those are just the ones that we know about.  There are certainly more out there.  Even though you are hundreds of miles from the nearest land, you can still be in touch with others.  That is a remarkable fact that is due to a combination of technologies:  sailing, navigation, and electronics, and the fact that our world will support communication over the flimsiest of methods.